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Religious themes

If you dream of God, meeting or interacting with Jesus, Aphrodite, Krishna, Athena, Vishnu, Shiva, Allah, Ahura Mazda, Gaia, Quetzalcoatl, Zeus, Breged, Frigg, HaShem, Maat, Lakshmi, or Juno, you are certainly experiencing religious themes. But in dreaming of them what are you actually meeting?

After a long experience of dreams, not simply interpreting them, but exploring them and experiencing the power, the depth, the divine and the awful within them, I see religious themes in another way than many others. It is based on the understanding that all dream images are built from associations – in other words a dream image symbolises or represent something else; usually a process or action within the person. Such images may refer to an outside person or influence, but they can never be them, just as our thoughts about a person can never ever be them.

If we break through the symbolism of the dream, we will discover a real and observable personal aspect of our human life. To understand this, it is worth reading How it Flows, and the following example:

Example: In my dream I was watching a fern grow. It was small but opened very rapidly. As I watched I became aware that the fern was an image representing a process occurring within myself, one I grew increasingly aware of as I watched. Then I was fully awake in my dream and realised that my dream, perhaps any dream, was an expression in images of actual events occurring unconsciously in myself. I felt enormous excitement, as if I were witnessing something of great importance. Francis P.

When we ourselves witness similar occurrences we realise that virtually all religious writings are only symbols of wonderful personal experiences. In fact, they are all related to the human body. And the human being as a whole; not as something common, but as a manifestation of Cosmic Life. Any of us now recognise that life on our earth is amazing and few people experience the wonder of it. We all experience it yet few of us feel the huge mystery we are, or recognise what an extraordinary mystery our personal life is. Organised religion sets out various approaches we can take in face of this mystery and a few of us kneel in recognition of the mystery we cannot fully comprehend.

Over the ages there are been thousands of different ideas of how the world and we began. Even today the search goes on to find and understand that question, and of course it may go on forever because it is so vast. But least we can begin to understand that we, and life on our Earth has arisen and been created by something, a process, an inscrutable and a wonder that has formed countless galaxies in such vastness, and we exist on a tiny dot compared with even the one galaxy we are on the outer edges of, and yet we have arisen out of all that incredible process. In some way, and if we consider the potential shown in some human lives, we are a reflection of that vast process, maybe even a seed of that wonder that is in process of growing.

Like any seed there are stages of its growth, and we can begin to see the stages by looking at our own history. It depends how far back you want to go, perhaps before the emerging universe had any light, when everything was still too hot to form atoms, charged electrons and protons prevent light from shining. Then after 300,000 years, electrons combining with protons and neutrons to form atoms, mostly hydrogen and helium, so light could finally shine – Let there be Light.

Everything as it happened was an expression on geometry, mathematics and enormous energy, and behind it all was an open door, the possibility of it happening; a possibility I call potential, an open ended possibility. “The cosmos was built with the tools which man calls music, arithmetic, and geometry: harmony, system, and balance.”

The stages then expressed themselves in the minerals and then as single celled life forms – still with that open door before them. From them we have all developed through the stages of plant life, sea creatures, then onto land as vegetation, insects and then the beginning of animal life. In our body it is shown as our spine, with its reptilian brain on top of it, followed by the mammalian brain on top of that, and our own stage of growth the human brain. See Animals in your Brain

It seems obvious that the human being is simply another stage on the growth of the amazing ‘seed’ of possibility that the universe is. So we are a direct expression of the amazing process that formed us, but we are all at different stages of growth.

The human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations; we take many sorts of pain killers to deal with ourselves. Things such as alcohol, coffee, medical drugs and street drugs, and yet we are still prone to break down, as can be seen by the number of people who need antidepressants or are totally lost in themselves. See Programmed

Human self-awareness was another stage of growth beyond instinctive or animal awareness, which is an old and amazingly successful stage. So we have to remember that having a personality with self-awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the what we usually call instincts. So the development of self-awareness was an immense step, and left us very vulnerable, and still does.

Many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our wider awareness and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking, and it is a shock.

That is why we tend to feel all such realisations as not belonging to us but to something outside and beyond us, like God, angels, a spirit guide, or our ancestors, and usually generated by our normal three dimensional body awareness, stuck as it is in an ancient paradigm. So if that is so, then those perceptions are true; but we now are beginning to become aware that fundamentally we are quantum based with no local existence. See Archetype of the Paradigm;There is a Huge Change Happening;Quantum Physics

So to realise how and why we exist is mind boggling – no wonder many people revert to seeing it all as God’s fault.